Patent Dispute
Adobe Systems holds patents in the United States and Europe on certain uses of GUI tabs, which are widely held to be trivial patents. There was prior art, in both GUI and text user interfaces (TUI).
Adobe used these patents to sue Macromedia Inc. for employing tabs in its Macromedia Flash product. Adobe won the case and $2.8 million in damages. However, Macromedia initiated a countersuit which ended in a $4.9 million ruling against Adobe. The suits were settled on undisclosed terms. In 2005, Adobe ended further dispute between the two companies when it bought Macromedia for roughly $3.4 billion.
On April 18, 2007, the intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. regarding its infringement upon a US Patent originally filed by Xerox researchers in 1987.
Read more about this topic: Tab (GUI)
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